“If we detain someone, that means they have committed a crime. When someone commits a crime, they have to go through the existing legal process,” he said during an event in Putrajaya.

“If we detain someone who commits a crime and we put them in a depot, and then they die, who should we blame?”

Hamzah said this when asked to comment on a report on deaths in immigration detention centres in Sabah.

“If I knew someone was going to die and (therefore) should not be placed in a (immigration) depot, I would be great,” he said.

“Sometimes people die even while walking… They don’t even have to be in a depot. So, this should not be an issue.”

On Saturday, a group of Indonesian NGOs, the Sovereign Migrant Workers Coalition (KBMB), released a report stating that the Malaysian Embassy in Jakarta recorded 149 Indonesians who died while in five Sabah detention centres over a period of 18 months, between 2021 and 2022.

The report also blamed the poor conditions in the immigration detention centres for the detainees’ poor health, with KBMB also claiming that detainees were not referred to hospitals when they were ill.

The immigration department is an agency under the home ministry.